Xander Harris - Urban Gothic

In much the same way as Umberto excavates the graves of old 70's Euro gore/occult scores for new nightmare-synth strategies, classically trained Austin, TX keyboard-creep maestro Xander Harris (aka Justin Sweatt) scavenges rat-gnawed 80's basement horror VHS tapes to sift out the glimmering gothic goldflakes hidden within. Grim process, grimmer results. Each of the unlucky 13 tracks on Urban Gothic, his debut full-length, seethe and shiver and boil with sleek synthesizer city-lights paranoia and cool, cold dread. A few are cribbed from the minimal/throbbing John Carpenter handbook ("First Body," "Crying In The Dark") and some go for more of a clawhammering industrial approach ("Hunting," "When The Hammer Starts To Drop") while a few marry the video undead vibes to an almost thrill-kill cult-dance beat ("Fucking Eat Your Face," "Tanned Skin Dress") that pulses blackly like a strobe-lit corpse. A cool detail is that Sweatt's a decade-deep drummer so every percussion sound on the record is actually manually played on synthetic drum pads, which gives the songs a looser and less mechanical execution. A bad-ass brainbomb of an LP with enough eerie witch-fog anthems to keep even the darkest darkwaver's head buried in the speaker cabinet. Expect tapes, tours, and even a 100% Silk 12" from this nightstalker in the near future. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with photographed-TV horror stills by Manda B Brown. Edition of 480.

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